Marlee Matlin  – Not Alone Any More   (Cert TBC) |Close-Up Film Review

When the then 21 year old Marlee Matlin won the best actress Oscar in 1987 for her role as the deaf heroine in Children of a Lesser God it made big headlines as the  first time the award had gone to a deaf actress at a time when deaf characters were nearly always played by hearing actors .  

It also made her a symbol and not necessarily always willing spokesperson for deaf people.  She then went on to a successful career largely in American television, including an ongoing role in the hit tv series The  West Wing. 

As a critic I hadn’t seen her in a film since the eighties until 2021, when she and fellow deaf actors Troy Kotsur and Daniel Durant played members of a deaf family in Coda.  This time it was Kotsur who won the Oscar – for best supporting actor.  In the meantime partly through the example and campaigning by Matlin and others, it had become almost routine for deaf characters to be played by deaf actors – a recent example here in the UK being  Rose Ayling-Ellis in Code of Silence. 

This documentary is the directing debut of fellow deaf actress Shoshannah Stern, a longtime friend of Matlin’s.  It covers its subject’s life and career in frank and intimate detail – her childhood love of acting, her passionate and abusive relationship with Lesser God co-star William Hurt, who was 16 years older than her, when they worked together, and her struggles with drugs.  It also includes enlightening interviews with one of her best friends Henry Winkler, who with his wife became a kind of surrogate family to Matlin and writer Aaron Solkin, who cast her in The West Wing.

One of the main conflicts in Children of a Lesser God was Hurt’s teacher character James’s determination to make Matlin’s character speak.   In real life both Matlin and director Stern can speak perfectly clearly but for this film their intimate and informal conversation as they both sit curled up on a large sofa, the sound is blanked out in favour of captions and American sign language. 

As a piece of cinema the film is engrossing and enlightening.  Matlin is an attractive and engaging woman and there’s a wealth of interesting interview material and illustrations of her work.  One particularly enlightening moment is when the film touches on how deaf children of Matlin’s age were encouraged, indeed forced to learn to speak, as opposed to using signing.  It also covers Matlin’s involvement in campaigns to improve the visibility of deaf people. 

It’s some thanks to Matlin’s advocacy that the option of subtitles or “captions” as they are also known is now a standard option on most tv programmes, on selected theatre performances and even on some screenings of films – for which as a film critic who is now somewhat hard of hearing, I am very grateful.